mulberryshoots

"Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?" ~ Mary Oliver

Category: Food

April 8, 2017

cracked wheat bread today . . .

While I have been trying my hand at making plain white bread and oatmeal bread this week, I remembered a bakery in Concord, MA. where you can buy the best bread I’ve ever tasted: cracked wheat bread. The loaves are huge and the crumb is tender to the bite and crispy chewy when toasted. I love that bread!

So, I looked around for cracked wheat at the local market and there was none to be had. Amazon listed it for a hefty price and I found it on VitaCost website in the same brand at a fraction of the cost. It arrived yesterday and this morning, I’m starting a recipe for two loaves of cracked wheat bread.

The first step is to soak the cracked wheat in boiling water for an hour. Next comes proofing the yeast in water. The remaining wet ingredients include warm buttermilk (which I had in the fridge from making a yummy buttermilk bacon salad dressing,) honey and molasses. The dry ingredients include a 1 to 3 ratio of whole wheat flour and regular white flour.

As an aside, I’ve been borrowing bread baking books from the library down the street – including “Bouchon baking” by Thomas Keller, “The Bread Baker’s Apprentice,” “Flour, water, yeast, salt” and also reading bread recipes online. What I have taken away for myself is that a) I’m not going to become a perfectionist bread-maker; b) I’d like to make bread that’s delicious every so often; c) I don’t want to buy a mixer with a bread hook.

Even though I was ready to spring for a cute, red Mixmaster stand mixer with a dough hook for less than $100, it occurred to me this morning that I might be able to mix the dough similarly in my trusty Cuisinart! So, I did just that. I followed the recipe and pulsed it in my Cuisinart, especially running it for a couple of minutes once everything was incorporated. I could tell that the machine was okay but beginning to labor a little bit during the final mixing so I shut it off. Then, I scraped the dough out of it and kneaded it by hand, adding a sprinkle of white flour to make it less sticky and easier to handle. Oiled a bowl and set the ball of dough in it and covered it with plastic wrap. Then, I set it in a warmed oven (turned on and then off, leaving the oven light on) to rise for a couple of hours.

BTW, if you try the recipe that is highlighted above, I noticed that there was no mention of when to add the proofed yeast back in. I combined it with the warm buttermilk, molasses, honey, butter mixture before adding the rest of the white flour. I’m also curious to see if the molasses is overpowering because it’s pretty strong in the dough.

The kneaded and formed loaves rose again and were baked at 350 degrees for 35 minutes. I was relieved to see that this recipe’s photo showed a slightly deflated top similar to what my loaves have been looking like.

Footnote: Here’s a photo of the first slice from this loaf of bread. Apparently, my use of a Cuisinart to mix the dough worked out well – the crumb is exceptionally light and the bread has a uniform grain. It also tastes good too!

dinner plate with butter lettuce, avocado, honey crisp apple salad w/buttermilk bacon dressing – & cracked wheat bread

 

 

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April 6, 2017

crunchy noodles with chicken . . .

Here’s what we had for supper tonight: Twice-fried fresh noodles with chicken, broccoli & spinach

INGREDIENTS:

skinless/boneless chicken thighs (3) from Trader Joe’s

Korean barbecue sauce to marinate them in

Scallions, crushed garlic, fresh ginger root (chopped up to stir-fry)

Broccoli florets, trimmed and washed

Fresh spinach, washed and dried

Fresh Chinese wonton noodles (thicker than usual, parboiled and drained)

Cooking sherry and cornstarch (a smidge of each, mixed together to coat cut up chicken after marinade

STEPS:

Mid-afternoon, rinse and dry 3 boned/skinless chicken thighs. I froze the other 3 pieces for a similar stir fry down the road next week. Cut up into smaller pieces and coat with sherry/cornstarch mixture – not too much nor too thick.

Heat up skillet with thin layer of vegetable oil; add crushed garlic, scallions and ginger, being careful not to burn. Add chicken pieces and stir around until almost cooked. Set aside in a bowl for later.

Stir fry the broccoli with a little more garlic and green onions, stir and add a small splash of water, cover to ensure broccoli is cooked – the water will evaporate. Then add back the chicken and stir together until cooked. Put aside 2nd time. 

Clean out and dry the skillet – helps to have a non-stick pan large enough to put the parboiled noodles in. Heat the skillet and coat with vegetable oil. Place the noodles gently into the pan until it is covered. Cook over medium heat until you can see the crispy noodles when you lift up the noodles with a spatula. Slide the noodles onto the spatula and flip the whole thing over. Turn down the heat to crisp up this side and keep on low until ready to serve.

SERVING:

Re-warm the noodle pancake so that it is crisp – hold it slightly up to drain of any excess oil and place it into a serving plate. Turn the heat on medium high heat and saute the fresh spinach on the edges of the skillet, then scoop up the chicken and broccoli into the middle to heat thoroughly without too much sauce.

Spoon the spinach, chicken and broccoli on top of the noodles. Sit down and eat right away! Love the crunchy noodles!  

 

 

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April 5, 2017

a quick (and healthy) lunch! . . .

The other day, I saw Martha Stewart on TV (yes, she’s still alive and kicking!) and she mentioned that sometimes when she comes home late at night, she’ll prepare a small green salad with sardines on top sprinkled with some fresh lemon juice.

Since I’m fond of sardines – especially the teeny tiny ones packed in two layers of a King Oscar brand tin, I thought I’d try it out for lunch today. This seemed like a good idea since we’ve been enjoying so much homemade oatmeal bread these days and I wanted to take a short break.

My salad consisted of some fresh butter lettuce, sliced radishes, vinaigrette dressing and a tin of tiny sardines layered on top, sprinkled with lemon juice.

It was quite tasty and satisfying!

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April 4, 2017

“cooking on a rainy afternoon . . . “

After lunch today, I mixed a batch of bread dough using Quaker Oats steel cut oatmeal. It’s a King Arthur “back of the bag” recipe and its ingredients are lukewarm whole milk, yeast, salt, melted butter, honey and flour in addition to the oatmeal. The shaggy dough felt really good as I kneaded it for about ten minutes. Then I turned on the oven light in our electric oven and set a greased bowl with the dough to rise for the early part of the afternoon.

After it rose the first time, I took the dough out, gently punched it down and kneaded a little more before shaping it into a loaf and letting it rise in a buttered bread pan until the top had risen almost two inches above the rim of the pan. Gingerly, I lifted it up and set it on the table while I preheated the oven to 350 degrees.

The fragrant aroma of baking bread is one of its great pleasures, the anticipation of peeking through the (closed) oven door and waiting long enough to cut a slice, buttering it with Kerrygold unsalted butter. I’ve packed a small container of the coleslaw and when the bread is cool enough to slice, I’ll slice a third of a loaf for G. to take across the street for his brother and 98-year old mother who have their supper around 5:30 in the afternoon.

Nothing better on a rain-day and cooking out of the pantry and fridge! While Mother Nature’s rainfall takes the winter’s edge off my car in the driveway.

 

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April 4, 2017

cooking on a rainy morning . . .

It’s raining steadily today here in New England. I moved my car outside so that Mother Nature would give it a good rinse. Afterwards, I plan to mop it up with polishing cloths that I’m going to experiment with – you know, use the magic polishing cloth and one pass through will make it shiny and bright! Or howsomever. I thought I’d try this rather than going to the carwash.

A previous FB post reminded me of an interesting article by “Bon Appetit” about a restaurant Hillstone that serves basic American food but which many chefs like to frequent. One of the recipes that caught my eye was one for “Ding’s coleslaw.” Most of the time, I don’t make coleslaw from scratch because it was always easier to buy a container of it at the seafood store whose coleslaw was made fresh there and tasted pretty good – not too much dressing and finely sliced cabbage.

But today, I thought I’d try it because I had the ingredients on hand except for buttermilk.  I looked online to see what a substitute might be and added a little lemon juice to whole milk since I only needed a tablespoon of it for the recipe. In the fridge was a fresh half of a small head of cabbage, some leftover red cabbage that I had used for an asian noodle salad, half of a carrot, half of a honey crisp apple, some radishes and scallions. By the time I had shredded the cabbage, the bowl I was going to use was obviously too small. By the time I was ready to mix the dressing with the vegetables, it needed an even larger, shallower bowl to mix it together in order for the flavors to blend.

I tasted Ding’s dressing which included mayo, pickle relish, mustard, buttermilk, horseradish and sweetener (I used honey instead of sugar) and it was light, piquant and tasty. Poured the dressing on top of the cabbage and apple, radish, carrot mixture and mixed it gently together.

Wow! now I have a huge amount of tasty coleslaw from a motley bunch of vegetables that were in the fridge. I love it when this happens – a silk purse of a dish from a sow’s ear of tired produce in the fridge.

This afternoon, I’m planning to set up some oatmeal bread dough so that it will rise once and again, baking the loaves right before supper so they will be hot from the oven when we sit down to eat.

I watched Martha Stewart make a frittata on TV this weekend and am going to shred zucchini and onion to serve as the base and puff it under broiler after the bread comes out.

So with pantry and fridge ingredients, we’re going to dine like princelings and princesses tonight!  Or something like that!

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March 30, 2017

milk and honey homemade bread . . .

The other day, I saw a photo of thick slices of oven-toasted homemade bread  buttered for an English breakfast. Today, I also remembered the scrumptious loaves of bread I made awhile ago with milk and honey.

Here’s the original post with the recipe.

Because I didn’t have a lot of flour in the cupboard, (I had about 3 cups plus a little instead of 3.5 cups plus a little,) I reduced slightly the amount of liquid and other ingredients to accommodate for a smaller loaf. The first round of dough rose mid-morning in the oven, warmed by turning on the oven light. It’s amazing how much warmth that little thing gives off!

Once it rose the first time, I gently punched down the dough and kneaded it for a short time. Then, I formed a loaf: folding it over lengthwise and crosswise placing the loaf seams down into a buttered white porcelain bread pan, a favorite in my kitchen pantry. Covered it and let it rise in the oven again along with a pan of warm water.

For supper tonight,we’re having leftover Kobe ground beef made into meatballs with tomato sauce and thin spaghetti – a chunk of parmesan cheese to grate alongside. The fresh loaf of bread will still be warm when we sit down to eat.  LOVE the aroma of baking bread in the kitchen – G. will be happy when he arrives home tonight!

Yum!

 

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March 23, 2017

“freshness from the grocery store!” . . .

This morning, I went to the store to pick up a couple of things for dinner: at the fish counter, there were some very fresh looking large shrimp (13-15.) I bought eight of them to make shrimp tempura  for supper.

I’ll do the pre-preparation (shelling, cleaning and scoring the inner circle of each shrimp) this afternoon, and use the rice cooker to produce a warm batch of jasmine rice. To round it out, I’ll saute some farmstand baby spinach that I bought yesterday with a couple of garlic cloves.

sweet potato, zucchini, shrimp tempura

The dipping sauce I make for the shrimp includes hoisin sauce, soy and a dab of ketchup and sesame oil. Maybe I’ll make some zucchini and sweet potato tempura slices too. We’ll see.

But what I’m writing this post about is an idea I haven’t done for quite awhile now – which is to make a mixed fruit salad to have on hand in the fridge for snacking or dessert. Organic strawberries, blueberries and fresh pineapple went together in a bowl with some stevia and fresh lemon zest/juice. It smelled so fresh and appetizing – and it was a nice nod towards the beginning of the growing season here in New England.

 

 

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March 21, 2017

“peach purse” for dessert! . . .

to serve warmed up tonight – with vanilla ice cream!

Recently, I’ve been looking for easier ways to cook yummy dishes without fussing so much. Yesterday, I saw some frozen peach slices in the freezer section of the grocery store and thought how much fun it might be to make a peach pastry for dessert, even though it’s just the beginning of March and fresh peaches are still something we look forward to in mid-summer.

I’ve also been experimenting recently with frozen puff pastry – using it to top a homemade leftover chicken pot pie instead of standard pastry, for example – it looks so fantastic puffed up when you take it out of the oven!

chicken pot pie with cut out vents on top of puff pastry & added on top as decoration!

So today after lunch, I defrosted a small packet of frozen peaches into a mixing bowl, tossed it with 1/4 cup each of flour and sugar; 1 teaspoon of cinnamon and 1/2 teaspoon of nutmeg. Mixed all the dry ingredients together and then with the peaches. The puff pastry thawed along with the peaches.

I looked at the sheet of puff pastry and rolled it out slightly on all edges. Then, I decided to place the peach mixture on the diagonal. Before I closed up the peach “pocket,” I put a few dots of cold butter into the peach mixture, and squeezed a small piece of lemon over the peaches. I had originally planned to make a triangle but as I started to fold the puff pastry, the ends overlapped into a sort of pocket with the ends folded over. I pinched the pastry seams together and swabbed the whole thing with a little beaten egg and water. Sprinkled the pocket with sugar and cinnamon before placing on a buttered baking sheet and slid it into a 400 degree oven for about 30-40 minutes.

Checked it at about 25 minutes and it was already golden brown almost all over. Back in for another 5 minutes, I thought. It’s cooling now on the breadboard and looks pretty appetizing to serve with a dollop of vanilla ice cream tonight.

This is the first time I’ve used frozen peaches rather than fresh ones. There’s also a peach with mixed berries in the frozen section that I might try next time.  This dessert was really easy to put together and the warming aroma wafting through the kitchen made this a special first day of Spring!

 

 

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March 7, 2017

chicken pot pie with puff pastry! . . .

Earlier this week we had roast cornish hen with stuffing. Because we prefer dark meat, I saved the breast meat to make a chicken pot pie this weekend. So, this morning, I heated up a skillet and melted some unsalted butter, chopped and sauteed some onion, celery hearts with leaves, carrot and potato. Simmered the vegetables in stock while I deboned the cornish hen meat and cut it into pieces.

To the aromatic vegetables, I added the chicken, diced potatoes,  chicken broth and put on the lid. After twenty minutes, I made a roux of butter, flour and milk in another pan and gently folded it into the stew mix, and let it bubble for another twenty minutes. I then let it cool.

Near dinnertime, I folded in a cup of peas from the freezer (because they sometimes get overcooked and hard); spread the chicken pot pie mixture into an oval white porcelain baking dish (buttered,) and rolled out a puff pastry piece to fit the oval shape. I then cut a design into the pastry and crimped the edges inside the edge of the dish, covering the edges with aluminum foil so they wouldn’t burn.

I preheated the oven to 400 degrees and put the pie in to cook; after 20 minutes, it was bubbling but the crust looked flat and raw on top of the casserole. So, I increased the oven heat to 425 degrees, took the aluminum foil off and baked the pie for another fifteen minutes. When I peeked at it, it had puffed up and was a golden, bubbly brown. SO BEAUTIFUL!! I turned the heat down to 200 degrees to keep it risen and bubbly until right before serving. Meanwhile, I put together a salad of romaine, fresh navel orange segments, avocado and maple glazed walnuts that I dressed with vinaigrette.

We invited our downstairs neighbor to join us for supper – and cleaned up the entire chicken pot pie in what seemed like just a few minutes. It worked out so well that I might try this with a beef and mushroom shepherd’s pie filling with the pie crust on top instead of mashed potatoes. It was as scrumptious tasting as it looked!

Not too bad for leftovers!

 

 

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February 21, 2017

indian pudding . . .

indian-pudding

Well, it turns out that the homemade slightly runny meyer lemon meringue pie was G.’s brother, Jim’s, favorite dessert. Today, I mentally went through my dessert rolodex from the past and remembered that one of G’s favorites was indian pudding. I don’t make it too often because it takes a long time to cook (90 minutes after stirring stovetop for 15 minutes.)

Plus, I wasn’t sure if I had all the ingredients on hand. (It’s usually a test of the pantry when it gets to be 4 p.m. and I’m scrounging around for something nice to make for either supper or dessert!) I wasn’t sure whether I had yellow corn meal but I came across some blue corn meal – which I put aside when I came upon some corn grits polenta. That should be okay, I thought. Then I didn’t have enough milk for the halved recipe but thankfully found some light cream after stirring the mixture that made the pudding more like it was meant to be. So here’s the recipe I used –

Indian Pudding:

Combine in a non-stick pot, 2 1/4 cups of whole milk, 1/2 cup packed brown sugar, 1-2 tablespoons of dark molasses, 1/2 teaspoon ground ginger. Cook it over low-medium heat for 15 minutes (that’s right!) stirring it constantly so it doesn’t stick. Towards the end of that time, add 1/4 stick of unsalted butter and 1/2 teaspoon of cinnamon. Stir until everything is thickened. This is also when I added in about a half cup of light cream because I only had about 1 3/4 cup of milk to begin with.

I buttered a low fluted white porcelain dish and folded the thickened pudding into it. I also took a pan that would hold the dish and filled it halfway with water. This would make a bain marie to cook the pudding. The recipe didn’t call for it but I didn’t think it would hurt.  It’s now baking in a 325 preheated oven for 90 minutes. Cool for 10 minutes and serve with cream or vanilla ice cream. Nice to reheat the pudding in the microwave so it is slightly warm before serving if it cools completely.

For dinner, I’m using the left over Ciabetta bread in the fridge which I’ve refreshed with a little spring water and warming the bread cubes in the oven before dipping them into a gruyere/swiss cheese fondue tonight for supper. Maybe I’ll make a small spinach salad with avocado and navel orange segments on the side.

I think I’m going to wait to spring the indian pudding dessert on G. not until after he’s returned from next door, helping his mother to retire for the evening – a daily ritual.

BTW, I tasted the thickened pudding bits after I filled the fluted baking dish with the bulk of it. They tasted divine!  Can’t wait to see how it is when it’s finished baking.

Postscript: This Indian pudding (which does turn out to be my husband’s favorite dessert) had a texture closer to a cake than a pudding. I think that this was due to using corn grits polenta (which is all I had on hand) rather than regular cornmeal plus perhaps not enough milk might have accounted for this.

If you want to try it yourself, either use this recipe, please note these changes in milk and cornmeal. It might be more like an indian pudding than my little corncake. With freshly whipped cream on it, it was very tasty.

 

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